Separation Anxiety: Jake and Lily by Jerry Spinelli

This is a story about me, Lily.

And me, Jake.

We're twins and we're exactly alike.

Not exactly!

Whatever. This is a book we wrote about the summer we turned eleven and Jake ditched me.

Jake and Lily are fraternal twins, boy and girl, true, but close in a way that only twins can be. They only discover how close they are when, on their sixth birthday, they both awake from identical sleepwalking dreams of their birth:

And when we awoke that night hand in hand at the train station, and it's like the rest of us was finally born. We knew. At last we knew.

It's like a beautiful present had been sitting there for six years and we never noticed it and then finally we did and we tore it open, and... wow! the present was us.

We knew that not everybody can hear their brother from five miles away. We knew that not everybody yells, "I'm stuck!" when it's happening to somebody else.

What an amazing night, the night we unwrapped ourselves.

Jake and Lily discover that they can read each other's thoughts and emotions, that they can communicate silently, across any distance, and sense each other's emotions. Lily christens their special power "goombla." Sure, they're not mirror images, like identical twins. Lily is hot-headed and impetuous, and Jake is more contemplative and slow to speak and act, but they know each other in a unique way. For ten years this closeness makes them want to do everything together, to keep that special feeling of oneness going.

But then, as their eleventh year approaches, that poignant year that is the best of childhood and the end of childhood, things suddenly change. Jake doesn't want to ride bikes with Lily: he wants to ride around with a group of guys who call themselves "the Posse" and spend time looking for nerdy kids ("goobers") to tease and ridicule. Lily suddenly feels torn from part of herself, and she casts about futilely for a way to regain that lost closeness.

Lilly turns to her grandfather, a self-proclaimed "old hippie" who knows since the death of his wife what it means to lose a part of yourself. He tries to counsel Lily, telling her she has to find the "Just Lily" part of her real self and suggests she find an interest that she doesn't share with Jake, a hobby or another friend. Lily's first tries at defining herself are failures, and for the first time she experiences what it means to feel alone and lonely.

Meanwhile, Jake's guy fun begins to pale, as the gang settles upon one "goober," a new kid in the neighborhood--Ernest, a super smart, super-dorky type whose guileless gratitude for what he construes as the gang's "friendship" keeps their loutish leader, The Bumpster, in stitches as he leads his cohorts into tormenting Ernie, vandalizing his tottering clubhouse over and over as Ernie patiently rebuilds. Jake likes the burping contests, the junk-food binges in their "hideout," and riding around town looking cool that goes with membership in the Posse, but he realizes that he's actually beginning to like and respect the off-beat Ernie, and his guilt at their bullying begins to separate him from his buddies. Lily also feels herself changing. Suddenly she meets a new girl and they fall into an easy, empathetic friendship that mirrors the one she's known with her brother.

Is this the end of her special goombla with Jake? Does this summer mean there is no special relationship in the future for the twins?

It's not easy to write absorbing psychological fiction for elementary readers, but as his top-selling, Newbery-winning Maniac Magee proves, Jerry Spinelli is a master of his craft, taking us inside his character's minds while spinning out fast-paced middle reader action with the best of them. In his latest, Jake and Lily (HarperCollins, 2012) Spinelli uses alternating chapters to tell Jake and Lily's story of that definitive summer in their own voices, a summer which leaves them with a new sense of self and a new understanding for the other as well.

Says Publishers Weekly, "Spinelli adroitly balances emotional tension with introspective moments in this smart and funny story about a pair of twins growing apart."

Ling and Ting: Not Exactly the Same by Grace Lin

LING AND TING ARE TWINS. THEY HAVE THE SAME BROWN EYES.

THEY HAVE THE SAME PINK CHEEKS.

THEY HAVE THE SAME HAPPY SMILES.

PEOPLE SEE THEM AND THEY SAY "YOU TWO ARE EXACTLY ALIKE.'

"WE ARE NOT EXACTLY THE SAME," LING SAYS.

TING LAUGHS BECAUSE SHE IS THINKING THE SAME THING.

Their differences must all be on the inside, until the identical twins go to get their identical haircuts. Ling sIts perfectly still and gets a perfect haircut with perfect straight bangs.

Ting, however, can't sit still. She fidgets with her feet and hands. And when the tiny trimmings from her bangs hit her nose, she sneezes. With that sneeze, the startled barber's shears cut a big uneven whack out of hers.

Now the twins are not exactly alike anymore!

In the six short chapters of her 2011 Theodore Seuss Geisel-Award-winning beginning reader, Ling & Ting: Not Exactly the Same! (Little, Brown, 2010) Grace Lin shows all the ways Ling and Ting are not alike. In one chapter," Ling just cannot manage to eat with chopsticks; Ting suggests that she could use her own deftly welded chopsticks to feed her sister, but Ling has a better idea--a fork! Ting prefers fairy tale books from the library, but Ling only wants nonfiction books about dogs. And in doing card tricks, both girls strike out as Ting can't find the right card for her card trick, but by the time she realizes she's done the trick wrong, Ling has forgotten the card she's supposed to remember anyway.

In the chapter titled "Making Dumplings," the girls follow the exact same steps, but Ting overstuffs her dumplings so that they come out all lumpy-bumpy compared to Ling's perfect smooth ones. But that difference suits Ting just fine:

"YOUR DUMPLINGS ARE DUMP-LINGS," SHE SAYS. "MINE ARE DUMP-TINGS!"

Viva la difference! in Lin's engaging little essay on winning at twindom. With starred reviews from both Booklist and School Library Journal and a Geisel honor award for one of the best easy readers of the year, Lin's kickoff entry for what should be a winning twin series is like getting two for the price of one for emergent readers.

Twin Tryst: My Sister the Vampire: Switched by Sienna Mercer

Olivia Abbott is new in town, and, wearing her best pink skirt and a determinedly perky smile, enters her new middle school to begin eighth grade. Unlike her previous school on the coast, this one is old and ivy-covered, with dark, high-ceilinged halls and dusty black-and-white photos lining the walls. There seem to be a lot more Goth kids here, too, so many that Olivia feels "like a lollipop in a graveyard" among the black-clad students. Still, a pale Goth girl named Ivy gives her friendly directions to the office, and Olivia is happy to find herself in several classes with the strangely familiar-looking girl.

It is only when Ivy and Olivia see themselves together in a mirror in the girls' room that they realize that they look alike. In fact, they are as identical as twins. When they start asking questions, they discover that they are both adopted, have the same birthday and birthplace, and wear identical dark emerald rings from their real parents. Olivia and Ivy are sure they are real twins and can't resist the fun of switching identities. Using makeup to blend their different skin tones and exchanging eye makeup, Ivy pretends to be a bouncy cheerleader wannabe and Olivia becomes a gloomy Goth. "What better way is there for sisters to get to know each other than to be each other?" says Olivia.

While Ivy as Olivia has a power lunch with snooty pep captain Charlotte Brown and the other cheerleaders, Olivia, dressed as Ivy, meets up with Brendan, the boy Ivy has had a secret crush on for years. While the well-coached Ivy, costumed as Olivia, is replying "Re-e-a-a-lly?" to every remark at lunch, the friendly Olivia, as Ivy, meets and accepts a date with Brandon at the mall on Saturday. True to the twin-switch cliche', Ivy turns out to have an important meeting to plan the All Hallow's Eve party on Saturday, and the two decide that Olivia will have to pretend to be Ivy at the meeting so that the real Ivy can have her first date with Brandon.

When Olivia discovers that Ivy and her pale Goth friends are really vampires, new complications arise for the long-lost twins. In standard "double trouble" style, the two now-devoted sisters work through a series of comic complications, switching identities whenever necessary to make sure that Olivia makes the cheerleading squad and Ivy goes to the All Hallows Ball with Brendan by the end of the novel.

This spoof on twin pranks and teenage vampires is light and in good fun (no biting for these tame vampires--just rare hamburgers now and then), and the vampy identity switch makes for an, er, fangciful switch on the usual middle school BF story. My Sister the Vampire #1: Switched (My Sister the Vampire) is followed by sequels My Sister the Vampire #2: Fangtastic (My Sister the Vampire), My Sister the Vampire #3: Re-Vamped (My Sister the Vampire), and My Sister the Vampire #4: Vampalicious (My Sister the Vampire).